Dr. John Lee Awarded National Grant for Emergency AI Project

Dr. John H. Lee, MD, PhD, Instructor of Emergency Medicine at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School, has been awarded the National Foundation of Emergency Medicine (NFEM) Scholar Program 2026 for his project, “Automated Video-Based Assessment of Respiratory Distress Using Artificial Intelligence in the Emergency Department.”

This project addresses a fundamental gap in current respiratory monitoring by developing an AI-driven, video-based system to continuously and objectively capture the visual signs of respiratory distress that experienced clinicians rely on but that no existing technology can quantify or track.

The technology has potential applications across emergency departments, hospital wards, rehabilitation facilities, and home monitoring. Dr. Lee is mentored by Dr. Michael W. Donnino, Director of the Center for Resuscitation Science, and Dr. William T. Freeman, Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.